Two Gigs

Last night i had the misfortune to catch Dot Allison, on tour to plug new album ‘We Are Science.’ The album’s a decent enough bit of work, if over-reliant on Factory-worship, but the gig was, well, cack. Read all about it. (usual apologia for flowery hackwork applies.)

And then there was Akufen! Without a shadow of a doubt the finest electronic music gig i have witnessed this year. Arguably any year, at least while i’m basking in the afterglow. Mark LeClair’s records were something of an epiphany as far as i was concerned, setting a new blueprint for how house music at it’s best should sound, eschewing the tired old tropes without losing the the, er, house-ness, welding glitch noises onto mad time-signature jumps and weird clattering arythmic phrases. He isn’t just plonking a new soundset onto house music as we understand it today, he is genuinely making a new kind of dance music. How cool is that? I believe it’s called micro-house, click-house, glitch-house or whorehouse, but Akufen can’t really be compared to other practitioners i’ve heard, since he’s already broken out of the new genre. The only problem is, after a couple of disheartening encounters trapped in back-order hell with online record shops, I can’t track down his bloody records, save for recent 12” ‘Psychometry.’ Here’s an (incomplete) discography, and his output so far has been, for the most part, on Perlon and Force-Inc. Buy all of his records, if you can.

Meanwhile, Rhizome points the way to Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement by Josephine Berry, which makes some interesting points, some of which I intend to steal in order to impress the researcher from the BBC’s Money Programme I’m meeting this afternoon, thereby furthering my life-long dream of becoming an ill-informed TV pundit. Or something.

Posted at 11am on 20/05/02 by Jack Mottram to the music category.
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